The Project Gutenberg eBook, Studies in Early Victorian Literature, by Frederic Harrison

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Title: Studies in Early Victorian Literature

Author: Frederic Harrison

Release Date: May 12, 2006 [eBook #18384]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STUDIES IN EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE***

E-text prepared by Al Haines

STUDIES IN EARLY VICTORIAN LITERATURE

by

FREDERIC HARRISON

Edward Arnold
London ——— New York
37 Bedford Street ——— 70 Fifth Avenue
1895
All rights reserved

NOTE

The following essays appeared in the Forum of New York, and simultaneously in London, during the years 1894-95. They have been carefully revised and partly re-written, after due consideration of various suggestions and criticisms both in England and in America. The aim of the writer was to attempt a mature estimate of the permanent influence and artistic achievement of some of the principal prose writers in the earlier half of the reign of our Queen. The work of living authors has not been touched upon, nor any book of poetry, philosophy, or science.

CONTENTS

I. CHARACTERISTICS OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE II. THOMAS CARLYLE III. LORD MACAULAY IV. BENJAMIN DISRAELI V. WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY VI. CHARLES DICKENS VII. CHARLOTTE BRONTË VIII. CHARLES KINGSLEY IX. ANTHONY TROLLOPE X. GEORGE ELIOT

CHARACTERISTICS OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE

That which in England is conveniently described as the Victorian Age of literature has a character of its own, at once brilliant, diverse, and complex. It is an age peculiarly difficult to label in a phrase; but its copious and versatile gifts will make it memorable in the history of modern civilisation. The Victorian Age, it is true, has no Shakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott—no supreme master in poetry, philosophy, or romance, whose work is incorporated with the thought of the world, who is destined to form epochs and to endure for centuries. Its genius is more scientific than literary, more historical than dramatic, greater in discovery than in abstract thought.

In lyric poetry and in romance our age has names second only to the greatest; its researches into nature and history are at least equal to those of any previous epoch; and, if it has not many great philosophers, it has developed the latest, most arduous, most important of all the sciences. This is the age of Sociology: its central achievement has been the revelation of social laws. This social aspect of thought colours the poetry, the romance, the literature, the art, and the philosophy of the Victorian Age. Literature has been the gainer thereby in originality and in force. It has been the loser in symmetry, in dignity, in grace.

The Victorian Age is a convenient term in English literature to describe the period from 1837 to 1895: not that we assign any sacramental efficacy to a reign, or assume that the Queen has given any special impulse to the writers of her time. Neither reigns, nor years, nor centuries, nor any arbitrary measure of time in the gradual evolution of thought can be exactly applied, or have any formative influence. A period of so many years, having some well-known name by which it can be labelled, is a mere artifice of classification. And of course an Englishman will not venture to include in his survey the American writers, or to bring them within his national era. The date, 1837, is an arbitrary point, and a purely English point. Yet it is curious how different a colour may be seen in the main current of the English literature produced before and after that year. In the year of the Queen's accession to the throne, the great writers of the early part of this century were either dead or silent. Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, Sheridan, Hazlitt, Mackintosh, Crabbe, and Cobbett, were gone. There were still living in 1837, Wordsworth, Southey, Campbell, Moore, Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, De Quincey, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Mitford, Leigh Hunt, Brougham, Samuel Rogers:—living, it is true, but they had all produced their important work at some earlier date. Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Macaulay, Tennyson, Browning, had begun to write, but were not generally known. The principal English authors who belong equally to the Georgian and to the Victorian Age are Landor, Bulwer, Disraeli, Hallam, and Milman, and they are not quite in the very first rank in either age. It is a significant fact that the reign of the Queen has produced, with trifling exceptions, the whole work of Tennyson, the Brownings, Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, George Eliot, Kingsley, Trollope, Spencer, Mill, Darwin, Ruskin, Grote, Macaulay, Freeman, Froude, Lecky, Milman, Green, Maine, Matthew Arnold, Symonds, Rossetti, Swinburne, Morris, John Morley, to say nothing of younger men who are still in their prime and promise.

Widely as these differ among themselves, they have characters which differentiate them from all men of the eighteenth century, and also from the men of the era of Goethe and Scott. Can we imagine Sartor Resartus being published in the age of Johnson, or In Memoriam in that of Byron? How different a land is the Italy which Ruskin sees from the Italy that Rogers knew! What a new world is that of the Brontës and George Eliot beside that which was painted by Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen! In what things would Southey and John Morley agree, except about books and pure English? Place Burke On the Sublime and Beautiful beside Ruskin's Modern Painters; compare the Stones of Venice with Eustace's Classical Tour; compare Carlyle's French Revolution with Gibbon's Decline and Fall; compare the Book of Snobs with Addison's Spectator; contrast The Ring and the Book with Gray's Elegy or Cowper's Task. What wholly different types, ideas, aims! The age of Pope and Addison, of Johnson and Gibbon, clung to symmetry, "the grand air," the "best models"; it cared much more for books than for social reforms, and in the world of letters a classical manner was valued far more than originality of ideas. And when we come to a later age, what an irrepressible and stormy imagination do we find! Byron, Shelley, Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey, Landor, revelled in romance and colour, in battle and phantasmagoria, in tragedy, mystery, and legend. They boiled over with excitement, and their visions were full of fight. The roar and fire of the great revolutionary struggle filled men's brains with fierce and strange dreams.

Our Victorian Age is as different from the Virgilian and Ciceronian style of the age of Gray and Johnson, as it is from the resounding torrent which was poured forth by Byron and Scott. The social earnestness of our time colours our literature, and almost distorts our literature; while, on the other hand, our practical and scientific genius scorns the melodramatic imagery with which our grandfathers were delighted. Gibbon would have smiled a cruel epigram, if he had been expected to thrust a Latter-Day Pamphlet on the social question into one of his